Gender, Place & Culture

A Journal of Feminist Geography

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Zika assemblages: women, populationism, and the

geographies of epidemiological surveillance

Claudia Rivera-Amarillo & Alejandro Camargo

To cite this article: Claudia Rivera-Amarillo & Alejandro Camargo (2019): Zika assemblages:
women, populationism, and the geographies of epidemiological surveillance, Gender, Place &
Culture, DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2018.1555518

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Published online: 05 Mar 2019.

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GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE
https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2018.1555518

Zika assemblages: women, populationism, and the

geographies of epidemiological surveillance
Claudia Rivera-Amarillob and Alejandro Camargoa
a
Department of History and Social Sciences, Universidad del Norte, Barranquilla, Colombia;
b
Department of Anthropology, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogot
a, Colombia

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

In 2016, during the Zika epidemic, scientists discovered Received 15 December 2017
another disturbing effect of the virus: pregnant women Accepted 10 September 2018
with the Zika virus faced the risk of having babies with
KEYWORDS
microcephaly. Governments and international organizations
Assemblage; climate
responded by encouraging women to delay pregnancy and change; feminist geography;
also by surveying their domestic spaces and water manage- populationism; women; Zika
ment practices. Feminist scholars and activists criticized
these measures as ignoring barriers to quality reproductive
health services and women’s particular vulnerabilities to cli-
mate change, as the virus was soon associated with global
warming. This article critically analyzes the unequal and dif-
ferentiated position of women during the 2015–2016 Zika
outbreak. Through the concept of the Zika assemblage, we
discuss how populationist interventions upon women’s
bodies also involved particular representations of these
bodies within different spaces and scales, from the house-
hold to the local and the global. We consider the geo-
graphical imaginaries and realities that shaped the
identities and bodies of those women, as well as their con-
nections with geopolitical notions of security and emer-
gency. In this way, we expose how impoverished women
from the Global South ended up bearing the responsibility
to maintain an international epidemiological order. The art-
icle concludes with a reflection on the dissonance between
populationist interventions and the root causes of climate
change and environmental injustice.

Introduction
In 2016, public concern over the global spread of the Zika virus escalated
when scientists discovered that pregnant women who were infected by the
virus were at risk of giving birth to babies with microcephaly. In response,
governments and international organizations in countries such as Brazil,
Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, and Jamaica initiated campaigns to persuade

CONTACT Alejandro Camargo fcamargoa@uninorte.edu.co Department of History and Social Sciences,

Universidad del Norte, Barranquilla, 081007, Colombia.
ß 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 A. CAMARGO AND C. RIVERA-AMARILLO

women to delay pregnancy while the virus was still in circulation. These pop-
ulationist measures sought to control the reproduction of ‘anomalous’ indi-
viduals through encouraging caution in women’s reproductive decisions.
A number of feminist organizations, activists, and scholars soon raised
strong objections to these campaigns. Critics expressed concerns that the
intention of fighting Zika via fertility control discounted systematic barriers
to accessing contraceptive and reproductive health services, the constraints
imposed by restrictive abortion laws, and the erosion of women’s ability to
make decisions concerning their own sexual and reproductive lives (Diniz
2016b; Carvalho 2017; Our Bodies, Our Blog, February 12, 2016; Women’s
Global Network for Reproductive Rights, February 6, 2016). In addition, they
exposed the disadvantaged position of women in the face of climate
change (Grist, February 20, 2016; Pacific Standard, September 23, 2016),
since the spread of the Zika virus was associated with the expansion of
mosquito-borne diseases as a consequence of global warming (The
Guardian, January 25, 2016; The Atlantic, February 24, 2016). Although the
Zika virus can be transmitted through sexual intercourse, Aedes mosquitoes
are the main vectors of the disease. Elevated temperatures have a role in
the expansion of the vector’s geographic range, the decrease of the incuba-
tion period of the pathogen, and the increase of the female mosquitoes
biting rate. In fact, Aedes mosquitoes have an aquatic stage in their life-
cycle, but during droughts when water storage in household containers
increases, the vector’s range expands (Paz and Semenza 2016). Therefore,
women living in areas with precarious access to clean water, poor mainten-
ance of public spaces, and susceptibility to droughts were more likely to
get infected.
In this article, we build on these feminist critiques with an analysis of the
geographical dimensions of populationist attempts to fight Zika and their
gendered implications in times of climate change. Populationist responses
were explicitly focused on women, even as the virus outbreak exposed the
unequal position of women in society, the economy, and the environment.
Accordingly, feminist approaches that problematize these populationist inter-
ventions and denaturalize women’s roles in the epidemic are urgently
needed. The existing literature—although scarce—has played an important
role in exposing the hegemonic relations involved in the gendered implica-
tions of the Zika virus epidemic (Gonz
alez and Diniz 2016; Rivera-Amarillo
2017). Nevertheless, the spatiality of those relations has received scant atten-
tion. Therefore, the aim of this article is to discuss how populationist inter-
ventions on women’s bodies also propagated particular representations of
these bodies within different spaces and scales from the household, to the
local, and the global. We argue that in order to understand critically the
unequal and differentiated position of women during the Zika virus
 GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE 3

epidemic, we also need to consider the geographical imaginaries and real-

ities that shaped the identities and bodies of those women.
Those geographical imaginaries and realities manifest in two ways. First,
the women who are infected or are at risk of infection are located in specific
and identifiable geographical areas: they live in the margins of developing
countries near the tropics, where climate change also poses considerable
risk. Second, the fight against the Zika virus targets the individual household
as a strategic space for the reproduction of both the mosquitoes (in stagnant
and stored waters) and the anticipated ‘malformed’ babies. In so doing, it
holds vulnerable women accountable for the ‘proper’ control of their domes-
tic spaces, water resources, bodies, and, consequently, the spread of the
virus on a larger scale.
We employ the idea of ‘assemblage’ as a way to understand the scalar
connections of viruses, mosquitoes, and human bodies within broader spa-
tial, political, and climatic processes. Through the assemblage, we denatural-
ize and politicize the place of women in the development of the epidemic
as well as the populationist responses to the crisis. The Zika assemblage
operates through the constitution of zones of epidemiological surveillance,
which involve spatialized forms of security and the control of human bodies,
mosquitoes, and places. Populationist and public health interventions not
only sought to eliminate the virus within these zones, but also to prevent
the virus from crossing boundaries and spreading from domestic spaces into
national and international territories. The zones of epidemiological surveil-
lance thus followed a strategy of controlling the vector in order to contain
the disease. This strategy has been in use since 1950s (see Hern
andez and
Obrego
n 2002) and has been pivotal in the history of social hygiene (see
Gutie
rrez 2010). During the Zika outbreak, however, this strategy also
deployed intense surveillance on women’s bodies and into private spaces in
order to control microcephaly. Drawing on the work of feminist scholars, we
will analyze how global concerns over the Zika virus situated women at the
center of a broader assemblage of unequal and multiscalar geographies,
catastrophic climates, and gendered notions of security and control.
We focus on the main discourses involving women that circulated in the
public sphere during the Zika outbreak. We have traced those discourses in
feminist blogs, academic articles, newspapers, government documents and
videos, and international organizations’ press reports and staff speeches.
From these sources, we extracted the main voices, images, and narratives
that depicted the actual and anticipated place of women in the develop-
ment of the epidemic.
The remainder of the article is organized in five parts. The first section is a
conceptual reflection on the Zika assemblage as a geopolitical phenomenon.
We then explore how the campaign against the Zika virus, and the fears of
4 A. CAMARGO AND C. RIVERA-AMARILLO

microcephaly, involved concerns over national and international mobility. In

the third section, we problematize the tropes of women that circulated
within the assemblage, and reflect on the ways in which they were produced
at the intersection of race, gender, class, and place. Finally, we analyze how
the household became the focal point of populationist interventions and
then provide some concluding remarks.

Assemblages and geopolitics

On February 1, 2016, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the
2015 Zika outbreak in Latin America and the Caribbean a global emergency
of international concern. According to official statistics, 33 countries
reported autochthonous circulation of the Zika virus. The countries most
affected were Brazil (between 497,593 and 1,482,701 cases) and Colombia
(around 20,297 cases). On January 30, 2016, Brazil reported 4,783 cases of
congenital malformations, a notable increase compared to the 163-annual
average (Zika Situation Report, February 5, 2016). Microcephaly in Colombia
was around four times higher in 2016 than the annual average, while in
Brazil it was around 24 times higher in the same year (Estada ~o, June 22,
2017). Some researches attributed the difference to microcephaly
“appearing just in worst cases” (EurekAlert!, January 23, 2017). Others found
an explanation in abortion legislation, as Colombian abortion law does not
impose a gestational time limit (Reuters, December 9, 2016) Despite the
statistical differences in these two countries, public health policies rein-
forced vector control and followed WHO’s guidelines focusing on three
strategic areas: surveillance, response, and research (WHO Statement on the
First Meeting of the International Health Regulations (2005), February 1, 2016;
Carvalho 2017).
The Emergency Committee of the WHO emphasized the importance of
aggressive measures to fight the Zika virus, which was seen as “one of the
worst health scares in recent history on a global scale” (Yang and Sarfaty
2016, 444). Specifically, the WHO warned: “For regions with active transmis-
sion of Zika virus, all people with Zika virus infection and their sexual part-
ners (particularly pregnant women) should receive information about the
risks of sexual transmission of Zika virus. Pregnant women should practice
safer sex (including correct and consistent use of condoms) or abstain from
sexual activity for at least the whole duration of the pregnancy” (WHO
Statement on the First Meeting of the International Health Regulations (2005),
February 1, 2016). In addition, stored and stagnant waters in domestic spaces
were seen as a potential locus for the reproduction of Aedes mosquitoes.
The bodies, intimate spaces, and sexual lives of women, therefore, turned
into terrains of epidemiological surveillance.
 GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE 5

Although this global health emergency officially ended on November 18,

2016, the WHO continued to consider it a threat and called for an extended
period of ongoing preventive measures and scientific research (Deutsche
Welle, November 18, 2016; The New York Times, November 18, 2016). Within
this ongoing research, the role of physicians was not expected to be confined
to the clinical aspect of the virus. For Yang and Sarfaty (2016), for instance,
physicians should also actively support climate change policies in addition to
clinical management and prevention in order to fully address the crisis.
Three interrelated theoretical assumptions help us understand the ways in
which populationist interventions imposed global climatic and epidemio-
logical fears of the Zika virus on women’s bodies and domestic spaces. First,
we understand the terrains where global concerns, biopolitical decisions,
non-human organisms, and subjects at risk connect as an assemblage. We
draw on Ong and Collier’s (2005) conceptualization of ‘global assemblage’ as
the ‘domains in which the forms and values of individual and collective exist-
ence are problematized or at stake, in the sense that they are subject to
technological, political, and ethical reflection and intervention” (p. 4).
Furthermore, assemblages refer to multiplicity, instability, events, actors, and
contingency (Nail 2017). As Tsing (2015) observes, “in an assemblage, varied
trajectories gain a hold on each other, but indeterminacy matters” (p. 83).
The Zika virus brought about a new set of unforeseeable situations that nur-
tured a global sense of fear and which recombined old and new configura-
tions of biopolitics, biosecurity, climate catastrophism, and populationism.
During the Zika outbreak, the indeterminacy of the assemblage stood in
sharp contrast with the development of a global emergency. Strategies to
confront the crisis required institutional preparation and bio-preparedness to
deal with unforeseen catastrophes, thereby bringing ‘the future prospect’,
imagined as a tragedy, “into the present as an object of knowledge and
intervention” (Lakoff 2008, 402). With the interplay of changing viruses, unex-
pected neurotropisms, spreading mosquitoes, and stagnant waters, however,
the imagined possibilities of an ordered world got disturbed. Furthermore,
these entanglements reflected other instabilities. Margaret Chan from the
WHO argued that “Zika reveals an extreme consequence of the failure to
provide universal access to sexual and family planning service”. Even worse,
Zika is “the price being paid for a massive policy failure that dropped the
ball on mosquito control in the 1970s” (BBC, May 23, 2016). In particular,
‘developing countries’ appeared to be partially accountable for the crisis
given the structural fragility of their healthcare systems. The instability of the
‘developing world’ might be as contagious as the diseases born there. In this
way, the Zika assemblages condense the fragility and instability of geopolit-
ical domains where impoverished women from the Global South are made
responsible for maintaining an international order.
6 A. CAMARGO AND C. RIVERA-AMARILLO

The second theoretical implication of this article is that Zika assemblages

materialize in women’s everyday life through what Bhatia et al. (forthcoming)
call a ‘geopopulationist’ project. The campaigns to intervene in women’s fer-
tility constituted ‘geopopulationist’ projects insofar as they involved specific
measures of population control through spatial and environmental practices.
These practices included multiscalar surveillance over domestic spaces and
sexual intimacies, international border and mobility control, and the delinea-
tion of global cartographies of epidemiological risk. Furthermore, the terri-
torialization of the Zika assemblage involved a reconfiguration of the
relationships between women, water, mosquitoes, and the climate. Here,
water embodied the tension of being at once a vital liquid, an environment
for the reproduction of the virus, and a medium whereby an unruly climate
impacts humanity.
The final theoretical implication builds on and condenses the previous
two. Our interest in the position of women’s bodies and domestic spaces
within the Zika assemblages necessarily bring our analysis into dialogue
with feminist geographers. Feminist geography and geopolitics have long
emphasized that bodies are spatially and historically situated. In doing so,
they illustrate how the personal, the quotidian, and the private are closely
connected with global political economies, geopolitical relations, and
broader nature-society tensions (Nelson and Seager 2005). A strand of this
intellectual tradition has explored how human bodies become contested
sites for the inscription of securitization and the international war on terror
(Fluri 2011). The analysis of the place of women in the global fight
against Zika benefits from this intellectual strand in different ways. First,
populationist and public health interventions to fight the Zika virus regulate
very intimate aspects of women’s lives for the sake of their own protection, as
in the case of anti-violence policies discussed by Massaro and Williams (2013).
For instance, mechanisms which persuade women to postpone pregnancy are
ultimately a way of “embodying security” (Sharp 2007) to save women, future
generations, and the global order from the consequences of Zika. Moreover,
as will be explained below, the fight against Zika in some instances involved
the deployment of military troops in prevention campaigns.
Second, a foundational premise of feminist geography is that gender iden-
tities, space, and place are mutually constitutive (Bondi and Davidson 2005).
This is particularly clear in domestic spaces that become strategic for the
reproduction of geopolitical relations (Massaro and Williams 2013). These
relations not only shape domestic spaces, but also strongly influence ideas
about what a woman is or should be. Populationist interventions follow that
logic by dictating women’s roles in the household and in their own private
life. Third, feminist geography pays close attention to the ways in which
borders, at different scales, are produced, policed, and contested (England
 GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE 7

2003). Feminist geographers have argued that international borders reinforce

naturalized visions of difference, hinder political alliances, and eclipse
commonalities (Hyndman 2004). The territorialization of the Zika assemblage,
and the global epidemic anxieties and fears (Ingram 2008), require the defin-
ition of borders at different scales. Through these borders, authorities
and officials define spaces of surveillance and militarization, from the house-
hold to international borders, to determine whether they are at risk or
safe. This in turn defines the identities and mobilities of those in and out of
those spaces. In the following section, we will analyze the concerns over
national and international mobilization within the geographies of the
Zika assemblage.

A traveling virus
The virus has been travelling through different countries from the Zika
Forest in Uganda since 1947. However, it was not until the 2015 Brazil out-
break that the virus neurotropism became evident to scientists and exposed
how the geographies of Zika and microcephaly overlapped. Although the
extent to which those geographies were directly related or not was unclear
(WHO Director-General Summarizes the Outcome of the Emergency Committee
Regarding Clusters of Microcephaly and Guillain-Barr
e Syndrome, February 1,
2016), uncertainty fueled global fear and anxiety: “a call for collaboration
and search for health policies must exist, particularly in view of the increas-
ing number of people travelling to and from Latin American countries [ … ]
Zika should be considered an emerging pathogen and a new threat for Latin
America (Rodr
ıguez-Morales 2015, 684). As Richardson (2016) pointed out,
travel policies in different countries specifically counseled women not to
travel to Latin America—thereby assuming that men cannot be infected and
transmit the virus to someone else.
Nevertheless, the problem of human mobility was not the only concern.
Like people, mosquitoes carried the disease as well. With global warming,
this buzzing, undesirable companion, colonized new places. Countries such
as Italy, France, Spain, and the United States found Ageypti mosquitoes
in their territories. Fear then was exacerbated by the presence of Aedes
albopictus, another mosquito which can potentially be a Zika vector: “the
main villain of the Zika outbreak has been the aegypti mosquito,” but
a second vector, remains a threat “keeping its head down, lurking in
A. aegypti’s shadow” (The Atlantic, May 2, 2016). People in the United States,
according to Rodr
ıguez-Morales (2015), were terrified over this possibility,
and Florida declared a sanitary emergency. In the meantime, new cartogra-
phies of the mosquitoes predicted global range emerged to reinforce
international fear (see, e.g., figures 1, 2, and 3 in Kraemer et al. 2015).
8 A. CAMARGO AND C. RIVERA-AMARILLO

In this context, scientific discussions intersected with political and ethical

debates in spite of the uncertainty and lack of specific knowledge. One of
these debates revolved around abortion as a potential solution to the antici-
pated risks of Zika for pregnant women. Women on Web reported that abor-
tion requests in Latin American countries with autochthonous Zika
transmission increased from 36% in January 1, 2010 to 108% in March 1,
2016 (Women on Web, March 2, 2016). Abortion as an option was very con-
troversial in countries like Colombia, where health-related pregnancy inter-
ruption is decriminalized, yet remains socially condemned. During the Zika
outbreak, the Minister of Health and Social Protection publicly declared that
“in Colombia, all pregnancies are at high risk” (Rueda de prensa Zika, January
20, 2016). Abortion in the case of confirmed microcephaly, however, was not
considered. Health agencies developed different monitoring strategies target-
ing pregnant women living in or travelling to Zika areas for additional test-
ing and increased prenatal medical care. Nevertheless, these strategies faced
considerable limitations in rural areas including insufficient staffing in clinics
and inadequate women’s health services.
Uncertainty and instability crosscut the different relations, institutions, and
actors that configured the Zika assemblage. But this assemblage also exposed
imbalances and unequal relations that have long shaped the lives of those
located in the areas of the world which were infected by the virus. For

n sobre
instance, Buss (OPS/OMS, Cient
ıficos llaman a intensificar la investigacio
el zika y la microcefalia, March 3, 2016).) observes that the highest rates of
infection are concentrated among vulnerable people living with inadequate
water and sewage facilities. This poses the geopolitical question of the
responsibility of the Global North regarding the unequal impact of climate
change on the Global South, where those impacts have been undoubtedly
more dramatic. According to Petersen, our vulnerability to both climate
change and the Zika virus increases with the movement of people, accelerat-
ing international markets, and increasing population density in cities and
small towns (WHO/PAHO, Virtual Press Conference on the Zika Virus Research,
March 3, 2016). It is in this multiscalar and geographical scenario that women
come to the fore as the main targeted subjects of populationist interventions
and geopolitical concerns, at the intersection of race, class, and gender.

Localizing women
The debate on abortion and microcephaly during the Zika outbreak exposed
the complex racial and class geographies that differentiate people and places
around the world. Specific representations of men and women emerged
through images of tropical landscapes, poverty, and precarious habitats in
developing countries. In Brazil, for instance, feminist scholars have shown
 GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE 9

how the geographies of the Zika virus overlapped with the spatialities of
social inequality (Diniz 2016b). The most affected women were located in
poor areas of Northeastern Brazil, “one of the country’s least developed
regions” (Diniz 2016a, 62) and where climate change is expected to wreak
havoc given its current periodic droughts and water shortages (Marengo and
Bernasconi 2015). Once the zones of epidemiological surveillance were deter-
mined in those regions, its residents’ bodies were declared open to interven-
tion. Interventions in the name of the fight against Zika, borrowing Fluri’s
(2012) words, “objectifies bodies and experience as continually expectant of
need” (p. 8).
Women of tropical, warm lands, who are vulnerable to climate change,
are often depicted as voiceless, passive subjects waiting to follow the pre-
scriptions of health authorities. Conversely, men are represented as sexual-
ized and absent: the ‘bad hombre’ of Trump, the Latino macho image that
“naturalizes behavior of subaltern men … incapable of adopting values of
modern ethics” (Viveros-Vigoya 2006, 126). Widely spread photographs of
babies with microcephaly bolstered this problematic gendered representa-
tion. Felipe Dana’s collection of family portraits of babies disabled by Zika,
which was produced in the state of Pernambuco in Brazil and appeared in
The Guardian in 2016 and other outlets, is an example. Only one of the nine
pictures includes the father of the baby. Seven photographs portray only a
woman with her child, and the remaining one is of a young male with his
baby brother. Here, men’s near absence suggests that they lack of account-
ability in the fate of babies with microcephaly. Nevertheless, these images
resonate with local stories about unequal gender relations reported by
Brazilian scholars. Porto and Costa (2017) observe that in Brazil many women
were abandoned by their partners after discovering that their baby had mal-
formations. Abandonment, in these particular cases, also reminds that the
care of people with disabilities falls principally to women, as feminist scholars
have long pointed out (Silva 2014).
Interventions to fight the Zika virus, therefore, became civilizational mis-
sions, or biopolitical projects that produce specific spaces and subjects. Even
if men are not mentioned, their bodies are being tamed through the govern-
ing of women’s bodies. Ultimately, the nation is civilized through women’s
bodies as well, as McClintock (1995) observed in the case of colonial regimes.
Pregnant women in the Zika assemblage are an expression of the uncertain
future of a nation, and thus they become perpetual sites of potentiality (Fluri
2011). Thus, controlling women’s bodies calls to mind the need of prepared-
ness for a series of terrifying possibilities of climate and epidemiological
catastrophe.
The subjectivities created in the Zika assemblage—the absent men and
the voiceless women—are a central part of the production of, and the
10 A. CAMARGO AND C. RIVERA-AMARILLO

potential solution to the crisis. Yet these subjectivities, as we argue in this

article, are tied to concrete spatial formations that are inherent to the popu-
lationist visions of the virus. In the next section, we will analyze how the
“vulnerable corporeality” (Dixon and Marston 2011) of women, which is pro-
duced globally, is also spatialized at the most intimate scale: the household.
In the household, women are not only subject to populationist measure-
ments but also to the male agents seeking to protect them. This is enacted
through pedagogical and militarized interventions intended to teach women
how to organize and administer their domestic spaces and water resources.
Fighting the Zika virus, therefore, became a multiscalar endeavour connect-
ing the intimate with broader notions of security and emergency.

Security and spatialized intimacies

Households constitute a strategic place where the relations that sustain the
Zika assemblages unfolded. The importance of households has to do with a
particular characteristic of the reproductive behavior of Aedes aegypti: the
majority of these mosquitoes breed in stagnant water near domestic spaces.
They travel and live with us and use our quotidian spaces to reproduce
(Hoyos and Pe
rez 2010). At a fundamental level, the Zika outbreak had an
important foundation in the intimate ecological connections between people
and mosquitoes. Because of this multispecies connection, campaigns to fight
the Zika virus in different countries invested large amounts of resources in
monitoring domestic water management practices. These campaigns also
included a pedagogical component to teach people how to eliminate or
manage water to prevent the reproduction of mosquitoes.
The photographs and videos which accompanied the development of
these campaigns often depicted women as central agents in the eradication
of the virus via specific mechanisms of water and domestic space manage-
ment (see, e.g., Limpieza del hogar es garant
ıa de nuestra salud, February 9,
2016, for a Nicaraguan case). This was not a coincidence, however. As
Sultana (2011) points out, particular notions of masculinity and femininity
are associated with specific water management practices. This differentiation
becomes more evident as climate change exacerbates ecological degradation
and transforms gender-water geographies (Sultana 2018). Yet the focus on
women and domestic spaces obscured other drivers of the epidemic. In an
interview, a woman told Carvalho in Brazil: “the house is clean, but look at
the street: the city government lets the garbage accumulate and then it
blames us for the mosquito epidemic” (2017, 143; our translation).
The pedagogical component of these domestic campaigns was not merely
a matter of knowledge transmission in which experts and women interacted.
It was also a security campaign involving army, navy, and air force personnel.
 GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE 11

In Brazil, the government mobilized around 200,000 soldiers to fight the Zika
virus, thus constituting “the biggest military mobilization in Brazil’s history”
(The Guardian, March 30, 2016). On February 13, 2017, which was declared
National Day of Mobilization Zika Zero in Brazil, nearly 71,000 soldiers were
deployed in Rio de Janeiro to “campaign against” the disease, “making peo-
ple aware” and “motivating the young to fight” (O Globo, February 13, 2016).
In Cuba, President Raul Castro mobilized 9,000 soldiers who joined the
Ministry of Public Health to support home-to-home fumigation (Aljazeera,
February 22, 2016; Deutsche Welle, February 22, 2016). When the virus
reached Haiti, health officials from the Dominican Republic asked the govern-
ment to reinforce epidemiological surveillance on the border. A Dominican
doctor explained that the political instability and the precarious health care
system in Haiti would inevitably prompt a wave of migration to the
Dominican Republic (7DIAS, January 2, 2016). As a response to these con-
cerns, the President of the Dominican Republic ordered a military mobiliza-
tion to wipe out mosquito breeding sites and to monitor the border (Puente
Libre, January 27, 2016). These responses in turn resonated with the historical
formation of an anti-Haitian sentiment within the Dominican Republic that
has resulted in thorny discussions on migration and citizenship (Gonz
alez
Vald
es 2017). Households, in other words, became spaces of securitization
where bodies, water, and multiscalar surveillance methods intertwined in
complex ways.
The spread of the Zika virus was a concern for both the health care and
the security apparatuses of national governments. Ingram (2005) argues that
disease and security both have the potential to disrupt state stability. But
the intervention of military forces in contexts of disease is not new. Soldiers
stepped into infected areas to help manage the quarantine during the
sheep’s foot-and-mouth epizootic sheep epidemic in the UK (Franklin 2007),
and also during the Ebola outbreak in Africa (Kamradt-Scott et al. 2016).
Through the intervention of military troops in zones of epidemiological sur-
veillance, states are able to reinforce the hegemonic masculinities already
reproduced by doctors and politicians in the field. Conversely, the role of
women in emergency contexts is usually invisible (Harman 2016). But during
the Zika epidemic women were rendered more visible as they were charged
with preventing the virus from spreading and reproducing locally, nationally,
and internationally. Ironically, state instability and chaos might be triggered
by something as seemingly innocuous as the still waters located in and near
the homes of poor women living on the margins of society, the state, and
the economy.
Diana Ojeda (2013) defines tourism as “an everyday geopolitical project
through which particular geographies of (in)security have been forged”
(p. 2). We argue that the fight against the Zika virus can be conceptualized
12 A. CAMARGO AND C. RIVERA-AMARILLO

in the same way. Nevertheless, these geographies of (in)security in the

realms of the household are connected with other forms of spatialized
inequalities and instabilities in the Zika assemblage. Katie Worth (Frontline,
August 10, 2016) has shown these connections in the case of Recife, the epi-
center of the Zika outbreak in Brazil where the most cases of Zika-related
microcephaly were reported worldwide. A number of these cases occurred in
the poorest neighborhoods of Recife, where water provision is intermittent
and, consequently, water storage is widespread. Worth’s narrative draws
upon a documentary about a city health worker and a soldier, who visit sev-
eral homes in Recife to teach women how to store and purify water to avoid
mosquito breeding. As these two men visited different homes, they also
pointed out the precarious material conditions in which those women live.
In Colombia, the fight against Zika was built on strategies previously
deployed to fight Chikungunya, which included a campaign entitled La
Vuelta a Colombia (Tour of Colombia)—named after an important cycling
road race. Through videos made available on the internet, the Ministry of
Health and Social Protection broadcasts the achievements of this campaign.
One of these videos shows a black woman from the Caribbean Island of San
Andr
es explaining the proper way to store water. As she speaks, two male
government officials stand by to supervise (Plan de accio
n de control al
~
chikunguna adelantado por Minsalud en 2015, December 4, 2015). Although
compassionate, these connections between poverty, stored water, and
women in need of sanitation training, ultimately led to a subtle conclusion:
the Zika virus is more likely to reproduce in ‘spoiled’ homes.
In a study on the representations of sex, race and space in South Florida,
Meredith Raimondo (2005) coins the term ‘spoiled domesticity’ to illustrate
how images of poor homes with inadequate domestic infrastructures and
insufficient housekeeping, served to naturalize the conditions for the repro-
duction of mosquitoes. The problem with these images, Raimondo observes,
is that they overlook the economic conditions that underlie the household
poverty. We suggest that these images also underestimate the gendered
conditions that underlie inequality. In the case of the Colombian health care
agent and the soldier, images of ‘spoiled’ households convey the idea that
poor women are intrinsically domestic subjects in need of men’s guidance.
Their husbands—in the cases where they exist—are largely absent in the
documentary and therefore they did not take part in the pedagogical and
security interventions of health workers and soldiers (see O Globo, February
23, 2016).
However, seeing women as mere passive agents awaiting the expert
knowledge and safety recommendations from men is misleading. In Brazil,
women in organizations such as the Aliança das M~aes e Fam
ılias Raras
(Alliance of Mothers and Rare Families), Uni~ao de M~aes de Anjos (Mothers of
 GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE 13

Angels Union) and Grupo Curumim: Gestaç~ao e Parto (Curumim Group:

Pregnancy and Birth), mobilized around sexual and reproductive rights dur-
ing the Zika scare (Carvalho 2017; Diniz 2016b). The work of Tatiana
Acevedo (2017) in Barranquilla, a city in the Caribbean region of Colombia, is
also illustrative of the agency of women during the epidemic. In poor neigh-
borhoods of Barranquilla where water supply infrastructure and service were
precarious, and therefore where risk of waterborne diseases was high,
women refused to let health workers cross the boundaries of their homes,
the private, and the intimate. Rather, these women made the decision to
keep storing water in spite of the risk.

Conclusions
In this article, we provided a geographical approach to the populationist
attempts to fight the Zika virus through the control of women’s bodies and
domestic spaces. We argued that this geographical perspective allows us to
better understand the unequal and differentiated position of women during
the Zika virus epidemic of 2015–2016. Drawing on feminist scholarship, we
deployed an analytic of assemblage as a way to discern how the Zika out-
break involved the multiscalar connections of female bodies, mosquitoes and
water resources with broader climatic and epidemiological fears, and practi-
ces of securitization and control. Through the assemblage, we problematized
the populationist attempts to fight the virus and denaturalized the role of
women in the epidemic.
The analysis of Zika assemblages exposed how multiple processes inter-
sected in a particular conjuncture. Yet this phenomenon cannot be seen out-
side of the history of inequality and past populationist interventions upon
women’s bodies. In this sense, the Zika outbreak of 2015–2016 constitutes a
new alignment of older and new processes that place women at the center
of multiscalar strategies to produce desired subjects, environments, and social
orders. Among those older processes, it is important to highlight the scientific
and political endeavors aimed at controlling reproduction, such as eugenics,
which has been widely studied by scholars such as Nancy Stepan (1996).
Among the new processes, climate change emerges as a problem affecting
people and places differentially. In the populationist discourse on the Zika
virus, however, climate change appeared as an inevitable driver of the epi-
demic that pushes the geographical scope of the mosquito, but not as a
problem to be addressed. The microworld of the household and women’s
intimacy in the Global South seemed to be more susceptible to intervention
than a problem triggered by powerful actors and economic relations in the
Global North. The Zika assemblage, therefore, presents women’s climate and
epidemiological vulnerability as a geopolitical problem of global inequality.
14 A. CAMARGO AND C. RIVERA-AMARILLO

Examining the Zika assemblage through feminist geographical lenses was

crucial to understanding not only how multiple scales and spaces connected
during the Zika epidemic, but also to revealing that this epidemic involved a
problem of environmental justice. The fact that women had to carry the dis-
proportionate burden of climatic and epidemic forces speaks of the unequal
place of women in a highly politicized and globalized nature. Furthermore,
through the analysis of Zika assemblage it was possible to expose the cur-
rent and problematic prevalence of populationist projects and the ways in
which these projects obscure other sources of crisis and instability.
Population measurements were a response intended to stabilize a chaotic
situation. Yet this response rendered women a threat, a terrain of interven-
tion that needs to be controlled with surveillance mechanisms and the mili-
tary apparatus of the state. In this sense, the analytics of the assemblage,
from a feminist perspective, constitutes a useful tool to critically understand
broader multiscalar relationships between vector borne diseases, women,
and public health interventions. It is important to note, however, that femin-
ist research on the Zika virus needs to devote more attention to women’s
narratives and responses to the epidemic. In this article we deliberately
focused on the discourses on women in different media outlets and by vari-
ous actors, but there are still myriad voices that are yet to be heard.

Acknowledgments
We thank the editors of this themed section and the anonymous reviewers for their
insightful comments and recommendations which greatly improved the manuscript.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors
Alejandro Camargo is a human geographer interested in water-society relations, political
ecology, and disaster studies. He currently teaches at Universidad del Norte in
Barranquilla, Colombia.
Claudia Rivera-Amarillo is a medical and historical anthropologist interested in feminist
theory, epidemiology, science and technology studies and nature-society relations. She
currently teaches at the anthropology department at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana
in Bogot
a, Colombia.

ORCID
Claudia Rivera-Amarillo http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8142-2659
Alejandro Camargo http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5812-8416
 GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE 15

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